As soon as the fight started, Allen Ginsberg went down on his knees and began chanting some Buddhist prayer for peace and harmony among all living creatures, which not only distracted those fighting, but also startled a few puzzled couples who had discreetly retreated into the bushes and were now returning in a hurry with their clothes in disarray.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
I fear that the president declared a premature victory for the Affordable Care Act. He made the mistake of thinking that facts matter when a cult is involved. Obamacare is now, for many, haloed with hate. Retaining certitude about its essential evil is a matter of honor for one’s allies and loathing for one’s opponents.

Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana documents Nepalese pilgrims as they are conveyed via cable car up to a Hindu temple. There are five ascents to and six descents from the mountain, an eleven-act vaudeville show in which the trips are separated by a clattering landing and an invisible cut made during the darkness of the turn-around.

In our time the transformation and transplantation of bodies are commonplace. The bionic woman, the bionic man—that’s us, more and more every day. We don’t have brain transplants yet, but we’ve thought about it. So what if a person could survive past his bodily death, to be reconstituted in another form? That is the question Marcel Theroux explores in his novel Strange Bodies.

On the surface, the speed with which Iraq’s new political order has fallen apart is a puzzle. There had been relative stability since the spring of 2008, when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki set out to disband the Shiite militias. But Maliki understood that the American-sponsored rules were temporary. Now, as it prepares for its first national election in four years, Iraq is falling apart again.

It is clear from Lincoln’s speeches, writings, and actions that he struggled against ambition in order not to let it prevail over his sense of justice. From what familiar political sources might an American of Lincoln’s generation have come to suppose that ambition poses a moral and political danger? A commanding statement was the pair of speeches by Brutus and Mark Antony to the Roman crowd in Act 3 of Julius Caesar.

The damage the Venezuelan government is doing to the country’s democracy is happening now: jailing political opponents, intimidating judges, beating protesters, abusing detainees, censoring journalists, and filling the airwaves with mandatory broadcasts of the president denouncing his critics as “criminals” and “fascists.”

“The reform movement in the US is led by a bunch of Ivy League people obsessed with data. They want to bring ‘accountability’ to the American school system. That means testing. They use China as the Yellow Peril. ‘If our kids can’t do math, China is going to kick our ass.’”

As Senator Mitch McConnell, an outspoken opponent of regulating campaign spending, has conceded, trying to put limits on political donations is not easy. In McConnell’s words, it’s “like putting a rock on Jell-O. It oozes out some other place.” But if it was difficult before the Supreme Court’s decision this week in McCutcheon v. FEC, it is likely to be impossible now.

If all politics is local, then much architectural history is also a neighborhood matter. Thus I harbor an abiding fondness for the Spanish émigré master builder Rafael Guastavino. Time and again in old New York buildings, it’s a delight to lift up your eyes and unexpectedly find Guastavino’s distinctive herringbone terracotta tile patterns overhead.